8 Account Management Checklists for Long-Term Customer Success

8 Account Management Checklists for Long-Term Customer Success process.st/account-management October 5, 2018

Alex Gallia October 5, 2018

Retaining valuable customers is a necessity In one of her hit songs, Adele famously sings the words “Sometimes it lasts in love, but sometimes it hurts instead�.

Minus the sentimental value, this also applies to the world of business. It is a simple reality that customers come and go and sometimes there is nothing you can do about it.

On the other hand, sometimes it lasts. Sometimes you can retain a customer for a long period of time and build a fruitful, trusting relationship that enables both of you to be more successful.

There has been some fascinating research done in recent years to highlight just how important it is to keep your customers happy.

Beyond the well-known Pareto principle that states 80% of a company’s revenue comes from 20% of its customers, Harvard Business School Professor, Sunil Gupta, has provided further evidence to show the importance of retaining customers that provide high levels of profitability.

Furthermore, Bain & Company have found that increasing customer retention rates by 5% 1/10

increases profits by 25% to 95%, and it is widely agreed upon in the SaaS world that the cost of acquiring a new customer is anywhere from 5-25% more expensive than retaining an existing one.

Needless to say, making a concerted effort to retain your customers is just as, if not more important than acquiring new ones.

Execute account management processes flawlessly Retaining customers, particularly high-value customers, is nothing short of essential for the growth of SaaS and other subscription-based companies, and to do so requires excellent account management.

That’s why we’ve gone ahead and created this set of checklists; to help you flawlessly execute various processes from conducting a thorough analysis of your competitors to the daunting task of preventing a valuable customer from churning.

Ever found yourself struggling with the sales-to-service handoff process or upselling? We’ve got those covered, too.

In this post, I’m going to provide a brief outline of each checklist and summarize why it’s a good idea to integrate them into your account management processes.

If you’d like to dive in and go straight to the checklists, here they are:

Sales Competitive Analysis Checklist

Your product is constantly evolving, and so are your competitors. Staying up-to-date and knowing how to clearly describe your competitive advantages to prospective buyers and existing customers is a key component of account management.

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Buyers are always searching for the best product, or rather, the product that suits them best. If you cannot explain in a concise, value-driven way exactly how your product or service provides greater value than the alternatives out there, you may well find lucrative opportunities slip out of your grasp.

This checklist is designed to guide you through a comprehensive competitor analysis to help you identify your advantages with regards to content, product features, and pricing, finishing with an opportunity to incorporate your findings into pitch decks.

Click here to get the sales competitive analysis checklist

Company Research Checklist

The more you know about who you are selling to, the higher chance you have of engaging in meaningful conversations that lead to positive results.

That’s common sense.

Trying to push a sale simply does not work anymore. Every prospective buyer wants to feel that their needs are being addressed in a thoughtful manner that shows the salesperson has done their homework.

From analyzing a company’s website and social media profiles to summarizing learnings from key financial statements, this checklist will guide you through completing a detailed analysis of a prospective buyer.

Show them that you know your stuff. I guarantee it will not go unnoticed.

Click here to get the company research checklist

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Sales Presentation Template

A sales presentation deck, also referred to as a pitch deck, is a vital document in every salesperson’s arsenal.

It is, in many ways, the face of your company; the visual representation of your product offering.

When putting a sales presentation together, you want to make sure that no important details are being left out, while also ensuring that you are properly prepared to present the deck when your calendar reminds you that you have a meeting with a prospective buyer in 10 minutes.

From drilling down into what problem the buyer has, to writing down bullet points for discussion and rehearsing the presentation, this checklist will break down a daunting task into manageable chunks.

Click here to get the sales presentation template

Monthly Sales Report

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This checklist is outside the scope of an account manager’s job duties. It is geared towards helping a sales manager assess the performance of a sales team and identify areas for improvement.

The process involves reviewing a number of key metrics regarding calls, meetings and performance ratios such as the call-to-meeting ratio, opportunity-win ratio, and lead conversion ratio.

Once the performance data has been gathered, an analysis is conducted to determine obstacles to sales success, areas of opportunity, and specific action items to improve sales execution.

By integrating this checklist into their sales reporting process, a sales manager can ensure that they are curating a thorough analysis of how the sales team is performing and assure senior management that steps are being taken to continuously improve both strategy and execution.

Click here to get the monthly sales report template

Sales Forecasting Checklist

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There are numerous ways to put a sales forecast together, some much more complex than others. Which method you choose is heavily influenced by how much historical data you have and what systems you have in place to track and manage your sales process.

The scope of a sales forecast can also range from being company-wide to an individual salesperson.

This checklist is designed according to the opportunity staging model, and is to be executed by account executives or account managers who also actively pursue sales opportunities in addition to managing existing customers.

The process guides an individual salesperson to analyze their list of current opportunities, evaluate the value of each one and the probability of them closing. The forecast data is then populated in a spreadsheet and sent to a sales manager for review.

When it’s time to forecast your sales for the upcoming quarter, run this checklist to ensure you are meeting your revenue quota and begin the quarter feeling good about where you stand.

Click here to get the sales forecasting checklist

Sales to Service Handoff Process

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Alignment between sales and customer success is absolutely critical to ensuring that the customer is properly onboarded and set up for long-term success. According to Pipedrive: When sales and customer service teams have a productive, collaborative partnership, they can make exponential gains toward that ultimate shared goal.

This checklist is designed to bridge the gap between sales and customer success by collecting important information such as links to relevant calls and emails, in addition to clarifying the customer’s current pain points and defining what success means for them.

The checklist is also intended to be integrated with your CRM so that all relevant data can be automatically updated as the handoff progresses.

Click here to get the sales to service handoff process

Upselling Process for SaaS Companies

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70-95% of revenue comes from upsells and renewals, while only 5-30% come from the initial sale, according to a survey conducted by forEntrepreneurs and Pacific Crest Securities.

Another incredible finding is that, for SaaS companies, the median cost of acquisition of $1 from an upsell is $0.28, compared to $1.18 from a new customer.

Simply put, upselling is a massive generator of revenue and costs very little.

When you’ve got that feeling that a customer has the potential to be upgraded to a premium tier product or to increase the number of users by encouraging adoption in other teams/departments, it’s an opportunity that cannot be missed.

This checklist will guide you through the upselling process so you can effectively present the customer with an opportunity to enhance their product experience and, in turn, increase their lifetime value.

Click here to get the upselling process for SaaS companies

Churn Prevention Checklist

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The impact churn has on a company is just as bad as the word sounds. It’s awful.

It’s no surprise that as the importance of retaining valuable customers has become increasingly apparent, finding ways to reduce and ideally prevent churn has become a priority for SaaS and other subscription-based companies.

Unfortunately, there’s no straightforward solution.

What steps need to be taken to prevent churn cannot be summed up in a simple, recurring checklist. The process has various key components including onboarding, personalization, proactive communication, feedback collection and showing a genuine interest in delivering the customer the most value possible. It is an ongoing and constantly evolving strategy.

Nevertheless, we can still help. This checklist is designed to help you retain a high-value customer that has expressed a desire to cancel their subscription, or according to their product engagement metrics, is clearly at risk of canceling in the near future.

The checklist will guide you through essential tasks such as evaluating their product usage, understanding their concerns, and offering retention incentives to keep them on board. It might just do the trick!

Click here to get the churn prevention checklist

Work smarter by incorporating process automation Automation is always a key point of consideration when building each of these checklists. If you don’t have any automation setup in your business yet, don’t worry. It’s surprisingly easy to get started.

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Through our integration with Zapier, Process Street offers a wide range of automation capabilities that allow you to establish various trigger-based actions to connect our checklists with the tools you already use.

Find out how to integrate Process Street with the apps you use every day, likeClose.io or Salesforce for customer relationship management and Zendesk to automate support workflows.

For more insight into how Process Street is used to streamline onboarding processes for both customers and employees, check out this case study.

Similar checklists you may be interested in‌ Check out a few other template packs below to see which ones you can implement in your business.

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